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Topic: Kenji likes the baking steel (Read 37495 times)

scott123

Scott, I get your point re easier to handle stacked pcs. And conduction, and food safety.

Well, that pretty much makes the commercial opportunity I had brief fantasies about fly away...

Keep fantasizing Brian (and everyone else). It depends on what time of the day you ask me, but right now, I'm not really feeling silicon carbide. At least not on it's own. I might be able to eventually source a $150ish 16 x 16 x 1" shelf, and, at an inch, it should have plenty of thermal mass, but... $150 isn't all that viable.

I don't know, if $150 SiC can bring all those anemic 500 deg. oven folks into the fold, it might be worth it, but I don't think SiC will be the next big thing.

The next solution is most likely going to be stacking. We need all the brainstorming we can get.

There's something really appealing to me about the moist nature of CPU thermal compound. The problem is, though, that there's very few liquids that can survive 600. That's why I keep going back to something tin based. When the tin melts, it fills all the nooks and crannies.

Good specs - any idea what the weight of your stone and steel is? Got a bathroom scale handy?

1st experiment: use the oven as you normally do. Note any differences observed- leave the pizza in your normal amount of time! Don't rescue it even if it looks like it's on fire! Just time the burn!2nd: drop the oven mod and see if the stack can reproduce or better your current results without it.

Good specs - any idea what the weight of your stone and steel is? Got a bathroom scale handy?

1st experiment: use the oven as you normally do. Note any differences observed- leave the pizza in your normal amount of time! Don't rescue it even if it looks like it's on fire! Just time the burn!2nd: drop the oven mod and see if the stack can reproduce or better your current results without it.

thanksBrian

Brian,

I have to weigh them when I get home. Currently at work. But I'll let you know.

scott123

I'm thinking of doing a little experiment with stacking steel & kiln on the weekend. But which staking order is the better one...steel on the bottom, kiln on top or the other way around?

Mike, other than possibly stress out your oven shelves, stacking wouldn't do anything for your setup. The goal for stacking is to recreate the effects of 1/2" steel with less weight for those oven owners that are in the typical 550 (+/-25) realm, without having to incorporate an oven mod. Once you have an oven that can exceed 600, 3/8" has no problem matching any bake time that 1/2" can achieve at 550.

In other words, you can have any NY bake time you desire (2.5 minutes up) with your hotter than normal oven and 3/8" plate.

You have yet to zero in on the precise temp for steel that will give you 4 minute bakes, but, with the pies you're making, I have a strong feeling that once you hit a 4 minute bake, you might find it a bit on the soft side, and that you might resonate more with your slightly crispier kiln shelf 5 minute pies. Even if you really wanted to hit that 4 minute bake, it would probably be easier to achieve with the kiln shelf, considering that's what you're more comfortable with. You're working at 575 on the kiln shelf but could go higher, right?

All the alchemy that we do boils down to typically anemic oven temperatures. If you're one of the lucky ones that can hit higher temps, the need for special stones fades away. In theory, if someone had an oven that went to 675, they could go to Walmart, get a 10 dollar stone, and, with sufficient skills/knowledge, be producing sublime 4-5 minute pies.

Mike, other than possibly stress out your oven shelves, stacking wouldn't do anything for your setup. The goal for stacking is to recreate the effects of 1/2" steel with less weight for those oven owners that are in the typical 550 (+/-25) realm, without having to incorporate an oven mod. Once you have an oven that can exceed 600, 3/8" has no problem matching any bake time that 1/2" can achieve at 550.

In other words, you can have any NY bake time you desire (2.5 minutes up) with your hotter than normal oven and 3/8" plate.

You have yet to zero in on the precise temp for steel that will give you 4 minute bakes, but, with the pies you're making, I have a strong feeling that once you hit a 4 minute bake, you might find it a bit on the soft side, and that you might resonate more with your slightly crispier kiln shelf 5 minute pies. Even if you really wanted to hit that 4 minute bake, it would probably be easier to achieve with the kiln shelf, considering that's what you're more comfortable with. You're working at 575 on the kiln shelf but could go higher, right?

All the alchemy that we do boils down to typically anemic oven temperatures. If you're one of the lucky ones that can hit higher temps, the need for special stones fades away. In theory, if someone had an oven that went to 675, they could go to Walmart, get a 10 dollar stone, and, with sufficient skills/knowledge, be producing sublime 4-5 minute pies.

Scotty,

What you're saying makes sense. Given that my oven is one of the cheap GE models it does produce some nice temps. I don't remember what the highest temp was that my kiln shelf heated up to but it was well past 600°F after a 90 minute preheat.

Granted, I have not put the steel plate through all its motions to see if it can match the kiln shelf but I'm really inclined to give it my best shot even if that would mean that I'd have to modify my current dough formula to meet the steel's characteristics in terms of baking performance.

scott123

Yesterday, in reply to Kenji's article, I collated links from this forum for every NY style bake on steel plate that included bake times, temps and undercrust shots.

While having the chance to look at all the results at once, I happened to notice that your sugar quantity made you a little bit of an outlier.

Your undercrusts have been stunning, but, I think, if you wanted to mess around with steel, you might see less of the burning that you were seeing earlier if you scale back the sugar, perhaps to around 1%.

It's also possible that 1% might be a little bit more authentic, although this is an area where authenticity gets a bit hazy. It's not as cut and dry as other aspects- such as the complete inauthenticity of vinegar and thyme in sauce.

scott123

Brian, I'm always a little reticent to post recipes, because the protein content/brand of flour will dictate the necessary hydration, and everyone's environmental variables will dictate the yeast quantity. My recipes are also heavily geared towards the equipment I use and my personal skills. Once you start trying to compensate for other flours and for varying equipment, it can be especially difficult.

That being said, here's where I'm at. I pulled this recipe from an older recipe I posted a while back that was directed towards a beginner. Since it's here, I'm leaving it, but Brian, you can ignore the beginner's tips at the bottom.

Measure dry (no yeast). Measure wet (+ yeast). Mix to dissolve yeast. Dry into wet. Stir with a metal spoon until it's too stiff to stir, then knead, by hand, until very well mixed, but no further (3-4 minutes total). Dough should be somewhere between cottage cheese-y and smooth. (Window paning is too far). Scale. Ball and place in dough pans. Refrigerate 1 day. Re-ball and return to lightly oiled pan. Refrigerate 1 more day. Remove from fridge 3 hours before baking (shorter if containers are thin and less insulating).

Bake on 1/2" x 17" x 17" steel plate (or larger if your oven can fit it). Pre-heat plate for 60 minutes at 515. Plate should be positioned on an oven shelf that's about 7" from the broiler.

Dust wooden peel with 50/50 flour/semolinaStretch skin to 17" and place on peelQuickly dress the pizza, shaking between each topping to make sure the skin doesn't stickLaunch Wait 1.25 minutesTurn on broilerWait 1 minuteRotate pizza 180 deg. with metal peelWait .75 minute, watching for cheese to bubble and darkenRetrieve onto cooling rackAllow to cool 10 minutesTransfer to 18" metal pizza panSlice and serve

On a 17" pie, I put 7 ounces of sauce and 11 ounces of whole milk low moisture brick mozzarella. If the sauce is the right consistency (on the thick side), the cheese won't slide too much, but if the sauce is thin, the cheese will have a tendency to migrate and boil over the rim. Even with relatively thick sauce, keep the cheese away from the outer 2" of the skin (sauce to 1", cheese to 2").

My tap water has a lot of chlorine, so I have to boil it and then let it cool first. I've tried bottled water, but I find tap gives me a little better oven spring.

The yeast quantity is going to be a rough ballpark. This dough is like clockwork for me and ferments in 2 days. With your yeast, fridge temp, flour age, water, etc., it could be 1 day or even 3. You're going to want to shoot for a doubling of the dough, but what's really critical is how the underside of the dough looks. Ideally, if you have a large wide round clear proofing container, you can take photos of the underside and post them here.

If you've never opened a pizza skin before, you'll have a really hard time stretching this to 17". Stretching skills are something that neither a book nor this forum can help you master. You just have to do it over and over again. Here's a video to get you started (ignore the rolling pin stuff and the tossing- my dough is too extensible to toss).

Launching skins off a peel is another area where practice is essential. The nice thing about launching, though, is that you can launch the undressed skin onto the counter, put it back on the peel and launch it again, repeating it over and over.

Spring King flour can be hard to find. If you have trouble, you can use bromated All Trumps and blend it with 33% all purpose. In order to make a 'true' NY slice, though, you're going to want to track down bromated flour. Full Strength should be substitutable for Spring King, possibly with a slight reduction in water (I'd give 62% a shot).

Also, for anyone interested, I'll be changing this within the next 6 months to do a room temp bulk, rather than the re-ball. Right now, when I take the partially fermented dough balls out of the containers to re-ball, the containers are a bit gummy, and it's kind of a hassle to wipe them out. If I bulk, I save myself this trouble. It's just a matter of dialing in the right amount of yeast for a room temp bulk and deciding on a time frame.

I'm sure your recipe produces great results, Scott... but are you confident that Mike can follow this recipe and get consistent results that will help us determine the differences between: 1. kiln stone2. steel3. stacked stone & steel

Or should he just go out and get a few dough balls from his neighborhood pizzeria? We need to eliminate variables, not introduce them.

Steel plate gets no hotter than any other hearth material. It just has the ability to store more heat, because of it's mass, and transfer that heat more quickly than most materials, because of it's conductivity, producing shorter bake times.

It depends on the oven, but I'd say that most 1/2" steel plate owners preheat their plates in under 70 minutes.

I will give this a try. I have some scrap aluminum sheets laying around. They are very thin, about the same as a cookie sheet. However, in the larger perspective, I'm not sure that adding a layer of aluminum to a stone is going to give different results than preforming on a cookie sheet and putting it on a stone, given thin aluminum's near-instant transmission rate.

scott123

I'm sure your recipe produces great results, Scott... but are you confident that Mike can follow this recipe

Sorry, Brian, I think I might have misread your post. Mike has a recipe that's he's pretty ecstatic about, as he should be. If he wants to do stacking testing using his recipe, I think we could benefit from the data, but, from the conversation above, I think I talked him out of stacking. FWIW, he's also using a special cordierite-mullite kiln shelf that holds up really well on it's own, but, because of the price point, I'm not sure I'd recommend it for stacking. Still, if he (or anyone else wants to stack), it would be invaluable to our quest.

Mike's steel plate is 34 lb. and his kiln shelf is probably 16 lb. That's 50 lb. It really depends on the oven, but 50 might be pushing it. If Mike's willing, great, but if someone else wants to join in, even better.

Bert, to match the heat capacity of 1/2" steel, you need 3/4" aluminum plate. At that thickness, it gets pretty expensive.

I don't know... with it's extreme conductivity, I'm not that hopeful for aluminum on it's own, but as a bottom stone in a stacking scenario... perhaps. It has one huge advantage over silicon carbide- it can be cut. SiC pretty much limits you to whatever sizes the manufacturer produces.

Bert, to match the heat capacity of 1/2" steel, you need 3/4" aluminum plate. At that thickness, it gets pretty expensive.

I don't know... with it's extreme conductivity, I'm not that hopeful for aluminum on it's own, but as a bottom stone in a stacking scenario... perhaps. It has one huge advantage over silicon carbide- it can be cut. SiC pretty much limits you to whatever sizes the manufacturer produces.

All right, I think we're talking about two ends of the same camel here. My impression is that the metal should be on TOP of the stone to more effectively transmit heat from the heat sink to the pie. Thus the metal thickness should not LIMIT that transmission by being a heat sink itself.

Logged

I'd rather eat one good meal a day than 3 squares of garbage.

scott123

As you move up the conductivity ladder you increase the propensity for char. It's not all that dramatic between cordierite (3ish conductivity) and steel (43), and you can also take steps (like lowering the sugar) to mitigate it, but, when you get into aluminum's realm (250) the heat payload is so proportionally greater at the beginning of the bake than the end, that I think avoiding charring for typical 4 minute NY bakes could be especially difficult. It's one thing to push the temp on steel and have char at 2.5 minutes, but, at 4, you really shouldn't be forced into char, like you might be with aluminum.

This is still something that I'm getting my head around so I'm probably not explaining it all that well, but I believe aluminum is going to have a propensity for extremely contrasty undercrusts over a wide variety of bake times. This is why I'm favoring aluminum as a bottom. For all these scenarios, I think steel is the ideal top.

scott123

Brian, I guess what I'm trying to say here is that when you look at the materials

cordierite 3steel 43aluminum 250

the fact that aluminum is 83 times more conductive than cordierite puts it in an entirely different universe thermodynamically- that whatever differences you see between cordierite and steel (and I do believe there are slight differences), these differences will be magnified many times over with aluminum. Faster can be better, as the move from cordierite to steel shows, but faster isn't automatically better.

You might be able to get aluminum to give off a slower, more gentle heat if you go to a lower temp, but a lower temp translates into less energy in the hearth. If a hearth has sufficient energy to bake a pizza at 550, if you lower the temp to 450 to slow down the rate at which the pizza cooks, the hearth may not have enough stored energy to bake the pie. As you drop the temp, for a material like aluminum, to match the stored energy of the higher temp, you have to go with a thicker plate. And that could get prohibitively expensive.

Still sounds like you are talking about the metal by itself. That's not what I'm talking about.

So what is the combined impact of corderite stacked under aluminum? Is it 250 and then the heat capacity of the corderite hearth? I can't see the corderite giving up all its heat at once, unlike aluminum.

My prediction is upon loading a pie onto the stack that you would see an immediate heat transfer of all heat energy present in the aluminum to the base of the pie. Then (in nanoseconds) you would see a replenishing effect, where the aluminum will draw from the entire top surface of the corderite and funnel it into replacing the heat lost to the pie. Eventually, the process would balance out, but not before the pie is long done.

Then (in nanoseconds) you would see a replenishing effect, where the aluminum will draw from the entire top surface of the corderite and funnel it into replacing the heat lost to the pie. Eventually, the process would balance out, but not before the pie is long done.

Does this make sense?

The heat stored in the alumium + the heat transfered from corderite to aluminum need to be sufficient for backing in the required time.

Just not sure how you can calculate heat transfer speed between corderite to aluminum .